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greetings -

This is a planning page for a new focus group. At the moment we don't have a venue, a time slot, an official leader, a list of topics, ... so please suggest and volunteer!

What we do have is a lot of interest from a lot of interesting folks.

What we need overall and for each meeting:

- topics - include a brief description and suggested level

- speakers - you can speak for 10 min or the whole evening...

                   - invite a guest speaker... maybe someone you work with who's got some expertise

                   - just (add your name) and the session coordinator will work with you.

- session coordinator - sketch out an agenda, gather speakers

Here's some topics suggested so far:

• tiered / layered design (Sloan Note:  Based on the interviews I've been doing, a lot of people say they understand this, but have just a vague "read from a book" understandng...But I don't konw if this is a common issue amongst members)

   concepts, philosophies,examples

  helpers - .net-tiers(Rick), code-smith, rocket?(Josh)

• arrays, lists, hashtables, dictionaries, etc... (Greg)
• fun with strings (Greg)
• how to select / put together pieces of .net technologies to design a modern app
• types 

  15 predefined - 13 simple and 2 non-simple

  user defined - class, struct, array, num, delegate, interface

• What exactly is a delegate and how do I use them? (Lee, Greg)
• dealing with multiple databases  (Sloqn Question:  Does this mean 1 code base hitting multiple instances of the ~same database?  Or 1 code base having to deal with multiple databases (and those db's are not the same) ?)
• search engines
• pragmatic programming
• oop
• event handling
• anonymous methods/delegates
• dependency injection
• generics
• Visual Studio, ASP.NET Win Client or Data Tricks type thing.  (Chris) 

  I see lots of programmers struggling with basic concepts of .NET in the workplace and on the user forums. List what is ViewState and what can I do with it? For that matter VB 6 programmers and even Java programmers have conceptual problems with state management on the web in general.

• creating custom events (Joe)
• Linq (Jeremy)
• Regular Expressions (Jeremy)
• Software Factories
• Enterprise Library
• Composite Application Block (CAB)
• Code Generation
• Unit Testing
• Strategies to Refactor or Rewrite Bad Apps
• Best Practices on Exception Handling and Logging including what you log and where.
•  Iterators (implementing IEnumerable<T> and GetEnumerator) (diane)
• Reflection (diane)
• ToString implementations for custom classes (diane)
• Safe casting, nullable types, and null handling (diane)
• Regular expressions in .NET (diane)
• IComparable and IComparer (diane)
• Files, directories, and streams (diane)
• .NET security (diane)
• Threading (diane)
• Overloading constructors, chaining constructors, and object initialization (diane)
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